XXIInd WORLD CONGRESS OF POLITICAL SCIENCEJuly 8 to 12, 2012 (Madrid)

Martin Heidegger: ontology, modernity and power♣

[Martin Heidegger: ontología, modernidad y poder]Miguel LeónUCM/BOUN

hsiyouchi@gmail.com

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to revise Heidegger's major works, specially Being and Time, trying to show how his philosophical account of society and history entails an important conception of power. We will also discuss the significance that the emergence of modern society (and of its specific contradictions) has within Heideggerian ontology and its account of the relation between subject and object, and among subjects themselves.Two major issues will be discussed. The first one will be the distinction between Vorhandenheit (objective presence) and Zuhandenheit (handiness), which can be considered an implicit influence in Foucault's distinction between discipline and security. The second one will be the triangular relation between the notions of das Man (the They), Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death) and Geschick (destiny), that can be read in comparison with the work of Guglielmo Ferrero thanks to the central role that the idea of fear (or Angst) has for both authors.Keywords: Heidegger, ontology, power, modernity.

Resumen: El objetivo de esta comunicación es revisar los trabajos más singificativos de Martin Heidegger, especialmente Ser y Tiempo, intentando mostrar cómo su comprensión filosófica de la sociedad y de la historia lleva aparejada una importante concepción del poder. Discutiremos también la importancia que la emergencia de la sociedad moderna (y de sus contradicciones específicas) tiene en el seno de la ontología heideggeriana y la forma en que presenta la relación entre sujeto y objeto y entre los sujetos mismos.Serán tratados dos asuntos principales. El primero será la distinción entre Vorhandenheit (“estar-ahí”) y Zuhandenheit (“lo a la mano”), que puede ser considerada una influencia implícita en la distinción establecida por Foucault entre disciplina y seguridad. El segundo será la relación triangular entre las nociones de das Man (“el uno”), Sein-zum-Tode (“ser hacia la muerte”) y Geschick (“destino común”), que pueden ser leídas en comparación con la obra de Guglielmo Ferrero gracias al rol central que la idea del miedo (o la angustia) tiene para ambos autores.Palabras clave: Heidegger, ontología, poder, modernidad.

♣ This paper is the first public product of a rather long reflection, still in progress, that began more than one year ago, while I first approached to the work of Martin Heidegger thanks to the wonderful work of Johannes Fritsche, whom I luckily met in a course exclusively dedicated to Heidegger during my Erasmus year at Bosphorus University (Istanbul). It was equally important for me to have the chance to share my first thoughts about this subject with the rest of the members of the Seminary on Sociology of Power, coordinated by Prof. Carlos Castillo Mendoza and Prof. Ángeles Díez Rodríguez, where we have been able to learn and work together for the last three years.The last day of our course on Heidegger, Prof. Johannes Fritsche posed to us the following question: “Has reading Heidegger given to you any tools that you can use in your own reflections?”. In the last instance this paper is an attempt to answer it.

Introduction: “Political ontology”.

Reading Heidegger politically is not at all an original form of approaching to the work of the German philosopher. Since the end of World War II, and given the deep compromise that Martin Heidegger openly had with National-Socialism, it has been a recurrent topic to re-read his works trying to find implicit or explicit traces of his political position. The question about the implicit Nazism of Heidegger's work can then take three different forms depending on the moment in which the work was written and published: it can thus take (a) the form of “did Heidegger first works, specially Being and Time, already show his future compromise with National-Socialism?”; (b) the form of “how did Heidegger's involvement with National-Socialism affect to his philosophical work during the years in which the Nazi Party governed Germany?”; and (c) the form of “how did the defeat of National-Socialism affect Heidegger's philosophical work and his interpretation of his previous texts?”. These three questions have been treated separately or at the same time by a wide range of authors, and the results of these analyses can be broadly summarized in this way:

The first works, specially Being and Time, are at the same time ambiguous but already reveal (as we will see through these pages) some traces of Heidegger's political standing in the context of the Weimar Republic. Then, the works written during the years of the Nazi government are rather explicit and leave aside any kind of ambiguity in comparison with the previous period. Finally, after the end of the war Heidegger comes back to a certain ambiguity, pretends to re-read its own previous work as if they were not implicitly or explicitly political1.

This paper, however, is not about reading Heidegger politically in that way. For us, to say that there is a Heideggerian political ontology doesn't mean that the interpretation of his work must be based on the fact that Heidegger silently introduced, like Bourdieu has stated, the political conflict of his time in the philosophical field [cf. Bourdieu, 1988: 51], but rather that Heidegger, from the philosophical field, approached to the reality of his time and built a philosophical system which was at the same time about ontology and about politics, about Being (Sein) and about Power.

To make our point clearer, let's compare Martin Heidegger with Thomas Hobbes. Reading Hobbes politically would mean, then, not only to read Leviathan [cf. 2009] as an interesting theoretical work about the nature and origin of the State, but also to read it embedded in its historical context, to interpret it having in mind Hobbes' own political position within the English Revolution. The way in which the political meaning of Leviathan determines or affects to its political contents doesn't mean that the work itself is not worthy as an analytical tool.

But the problem is that Leviathan and Being and Time don't have the same position in the philosophical field, and then we assume that Leviathan has, as a work belonging to the sub-field of political philosophy, a valuable political content, while in the case of Being and Time we assume that, as it is a work belonging to the sub-field of ontology, it can't have any political content. However, and in the same way that it is possible to read Hobbes (concretely the first chapters of Leviathan) as an epistemologist, we want to demonstrate the fact that Heidegger can be read as a political philosopher.

Thus, to say that Heidegger develops a “political ontology” doesn't mean, as it could be deduced from Bourdieu's work, that his work is marked by the political

1 Herbert Marcuse made a few comments about his conversations with Heidegger after the defeat of National-Socialism that we would like to quote here: “I talked with him about that several times and he admitted it was an 'error'; he misjudged Hitler and Nazism […]. He refused (and I think that somehow I find this rather sympathetic), he refused any attempt to deny it or to declare it an aberration, or I don't know what, because he did not want to be in the same category, as he said, with all those of his colleagues who suddenly didn't remember any more that they taught under the Nazis, that they ever supported the Nazis, and declared that actually they had always been non-Nazi. Now, in the case of Heidegger, as far as I know, he gave up any open identification with Nazism I think in 1935 or 1936” [Olafson, 2005: 170-171].

contingencies that were taking place while it was written, but rather (or also) that Heideggerian philosophy entails the politicization of ontology itself; it determines that ontology can't be a-political and, vice versa, that any political standing is attached, conscious or unconsciously, to an ontological position2.

We think that the two key issues, which are present in Being and Time but also recovered afterwards, that can be directly related to the problem of power and the tradition of thought that has specially dealt with it are the distinction between Vorhandenheit (objective presence) and Zuhandenheit (handiness) and Heidegger's analysis of what could be called the “social” dimension of Da-sein, which is studied in the sections of Being and Time that develop the concepts of das Man (the They), Sein-zum-Tode (being-towards-death), and Geschick (destiny). We think that Heidegger contributions concerning these two aspects can be better understood in their political implications in the light of the work of two major authors that have analyzed the problem of power: Michel Foucault [cf. 2004] on the one hand, and Guglielmo Ferrero [cf. 1998] on the other. The analysis of these two aspects will constitute respectively the second and the third part of this paper, using the first one to make a general analysis of Heideggerian philosophy, of what does it mean and how do we read it.

1) Concrete philosophy?

1.a) The critique of traditional ontologyIf we were asked to define with a few words the whole philosophical work of Martin

Heidegger, we would say that its ultimate aim is to make a critique of traditional ontology. And when we say “critique” we are thinking at the same time on two major “modern” thinkers for whom the notion of critique is of utmost significance: Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.

In the case of Kant, the matching point is that this philosopher calls kritik3 what Heidegger calls destruktion (“destructuring”). “If the question of being is to achieve clarity regarding its own history”, Heidegger says in the Introduction of Being and Time4, “a loosening of the sclerotic tradition and a dissolving of the concealments produced by it is necessary. We understand this task as the destructuring of the traditional content of ancient ontology […]. The destructuring has just as little the negative sense of disburdening ourselves of the ontological tradition. On the contrary, it should stake out the positive possibilities of the tradition, and that always means to fix its boundaries” [cf. 1996:

2 It is, in a certain sense, a parallel expression to the schmittian “political theology”, notion based in the fact that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development […] but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts” [Schmitt, 2005: 36]. In the case of Heidegger, a similar statement rises from the notion of Being (Sein). Any ontical statement (statement about a being), as far as it includes the verb “to be”, already entails a certain pre-ontological knowledge, about the meaning of “being”. So the ontological instance of our being, even if it appears in a pre-ontological form, is the condition of possibility of any ontical statement.

3 Kant defines the “critique of pure reason” as the “the inquiry into its possibility and bounds” [1914: 1].4 The Introduction to Being and Time is probably one of the most important texts written by Heidegger that we can find.

As he states in his course about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, in philosophy questions are already pre-determining, revealing, the answers: “We must repeat again and again that Hegel peresupposes already at the beginning what he achieves at the end. […] For it pertains to the essential character of philosophy that wherever philosophy sets to work in terms of its basic question and becomes a work, ir already anticipates precisely that which it says later” [Heidegger, 1988: 30].Thus, what we find in Being and Time is precisely a philosophical discourse which takes the form of a question (the “Question of the meaning of Being”) and an answer; the question is exposed, explained, developed, justified, precisely in the Introduction, and this exposition of the question already contains the nodal points (probably not all of them, but still the most part) that conform the answer that is going to be developed in the whole book. So, in a way, it is possible, and maybe it is the best way, to read Being and Time, to interpret each section, from the point of view of this introduction.

22]5.In the case of Marx, what is similar is the form in which that critique operates vis à

vis the tradition of thought which it is related to. Marx's work can be also characterized as a critique, the “critique of political economy”. The appropriation and reformulation of previous concepts developed by that tradition (value, labor, commodity...; being, phenomenon, world...), the construction of new concepts that refer to certain aspects of the subject that had been forgotten, concealed, wrongly interpreted (surplus value; Zuhandenheit) is a theoretical operation common to both authors, of utmost significance to understand the implications of the notion of critique and its meaning for both.

This characterization of Heidegger's work is general in the sense that it can be applied either to Being and Time or to the author's later works, those written and published after what he called his “turn” (Kehre) from the perspective of “Being and time” to that of “Time and being” [cf. 1998: 159]; in a way, what we find after this turn is a complex corpus of books, articles, conferences... in which Heidegger develops in a fragmentary way what originally was supposed to conform the Part Two of Being and Time (never published), strictly dedicated to the destruction of traditional ontology on the basis of the previous analysis of the meaning of Being [cf. Heidegger, 1996: 39-40].

1.b) The meaning of BeingIf we pay attention exclusively to Being and Time, what we have is a work in which

Heidegger builds up a system of interpretation of the meaning of Being, closed in itself, from whose perspective it is possible to re-read critically the previous history of ontological thought. But the work itself is based on a paradox similar to the one that we can find in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, a work whose purpose is to set the principles upon which metaphysics can become a science [cf. Kant, 2010: B22] and whose outcome is that metaphysics can't be a science at all.

In the case of Being and Time, Heidegger wants to define the meaning of Being, he wants to be able to say what does it mean that “something is”, independently of the time or the space in which that something is being. However, the outcome of the analysis is in a certain way that it is impossible to enunciate an universal definition of the meaning of Being just like metaphysics couldn't be a science according to Kant. This is because the meaning of Being is time, temporality (Zeitlichkeit), it is inscribed in a concrete horizon, it is contingent, finite. And still the question is being answered “universally” in this paradoxical way.

Then the question about the meaning of Being in general takes at the same time the form of the question about the meaning of Being in Heidegger's times. The transcendental analysis of Da-sein in general takes the form of the transcendental analysis of modern Da-sein. The ontical and the ontological, the abstract and the concrete, ontology and politics are thus inevitably linked to each other in the moment in which Heidegger decides to stand in between two different realms, levels, stages; two realms that can't be gathered together according to a traditional perspective that, Heidegger says, is based in a total mistake: the wrong analysis of the meaning of Being. We face thus a discursive circularity, a discourse closed on itself, that has a specific interpretation of the meaning of Being (and therefore of everything else) which is at the same time the point of departure and the outcome of his analysis.

Heidegger's thought is therefore in a certain way a concrete philosophy6, a thought

5 In the case of Being and Time and the Letter on “Humanism”, we quote the german page instead of the page of the english edition we use. We can't do so in the case of the rest of texts written by Heidegger that we mention because the reference to the german page is not included in the edition we work with.

6 The expression “concrete philosophy” is used by Herbert Marcuse in an early, purely Heideggerian, text in which Marcuse tries to answer the following questions: “can one demonstrate that a particular mode of philosophizing is 'necessitated' bu the present form of existence, ans which mode of philosophizing is it that proves to be necessary?”

about modernity that embraces, analyzes and tries to solve the specific contradictions that characterize modern societies: subject and object, theory and praxis, individual and collectivity, progress and danger... All these contradictions inevitably have a constitutive political dimension and therefore we will come back to them in the following pages.

2) Techniques, knowledges... power.

2.a) Objective presence and handiness One of Heidegger's most significant conceptual contributions is the distinction

between Vorhandenheit (“objective presence”) and Zuhandenheit (“handiness”). According to Heidegger, traditional ontology makes a fundamental mistake that can be summarized in three points:

(1) It makes an irreducible distinction between subject and object, between the self and nature.

(2) What gathers together subject and object in the last instance istheoretical knowledge.

(3) The being of the self and the being of beings is understood through the being of nature7.

Thus, the mode that we think is the primordial mode of being of beings (Da-sein included), objective presence, is in fact a derivative mode of relation based on “being-in-the-world as an existential determination of Da-sein” [Heidegger, 1996: 64]. And this being-in-the-world, the “worldly” being of Da-sein intrinsically different from the “innerworldly” being of those beings which are not like Da-sein [cf. ibid: 65], manifests itself primordially in the mode of “taking care” [cf. ibid: 57]. Thus, “in order for knowing to be possible as determining by observation what is objectively present, there must be first a deficiency of having to do with the world and taking care of it” [ibid: 61].

Therefore, the primordial mode of being of the beings of which we take care of is not objective presence (Vorhandenheit), but handiness (Zuhandenheit)8. “To expose what is merely objectively present, cognition must first penetrate beyond things at hand being taken care of. Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are 'in themselves'” [ibid: 71]. However, “as a primordial structural totality, care lies 'before' every factical 'attitude' and 'position' of Da-sein, that is, it is always already in them as an existential a priori. Thus this phenomenon by no means expresses a priority of 'practical' over theoretical behavior. […] 'Theory' and 'praxis' are possibilities of being for a being whose being must be defined as care” [ibid: 193].

[2005 :40]. The whole text is then an attempt to “land” Heideggerian philosophy and to use it to analyze, to confront theoretically, the social, historical situation he was living in.Later, however, Marcuse affirmed that he had been wrong, that Heidegger was “falsely concrete” [cf. Olafson, 2005: 167-168]. This conflict about the “concreteness” of Heideggerian thought is actually the unavoidable result of its inherent ambiguity. Of course we can say that Heidegger was “falsely concrete”, but, as we will see, he was also “falsely abstract”, given the unavoidable references to the political and social situation of Germany in the time in which Being and Time was written.

7 “Da-sein understands itself -and that means also its being-in-the-world- ontologically in terms of those beings and their being which it itself is not, but which it encounters 'whithin' its world. Both in Da-sein and for it, this constitution of being is always already somehow familiar. If it is now to be recognized, the explicit cognition that this task implies takes itself (as a knowing of the world) as the exemplary relation of the 'soul' to the world. The cognition of world (noein) […] thus functions as the primary mode of being-in-the world even though being-in-the-world is not understood as such. But because this structure of being remains ontologically inaccessible, yet is onticaly experienced as the 'relation' between one being (world) and another (soul), and because being is initially understood by taking being as innerwordly beings for one's ontological support, one tries to conceive the relation between world and soul as grounded in these two beings and in the sense of their being; that is, as objective presence” [Heidegger, 1996: 58-59].

8 Thus Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit are categories which “concern beings unlike Da-sein” [ibid: 88].

2.b) Further developments in The Question concerning Technology Two issues are not clearly solved in Being and Time concerning this distinction.

One is the active/passive relation between Da-sein and innerworldly beings, because in Being and Time Da-sein seems to have an active role which at the same time is implicitly questioned if the dichotomy subject/object (active/passive) is put at stake through the categories like care (Sorge), being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) or thrownness (Geworfenheit). The other is the relationship between the two modes of being of beings unlike Da-sein (handiness and objective presence) and the development of modernity (with the key role that science and technology have on it). The Question concerning Technology clarifies both issues.

Concerning the first one, the thrownness of Da-sein implies that, considering the Aristotelian schema of the four causes, the efficient cause is not the active principle on which the other three causes depend but rather just an intermediary through which the three causes manifest themselves (apophainesthai)9. Thus, from a perception of human action according to which there is a powerful, autonomous, self-conscious subject that acts upon a powerless, determined, non-conscious object, a perception that implies to understand truth like the appropriation of the essence object by the enunciate, we move to a perception of human action for which the activeness of the subject is questioned by the subject's embeddedness in a determined context and therefore truth is not the appropriation of the object but the path to the object, the way through which it is possible to let the object to show itself.

Concerning the other, Heidegger distinguishes between “earlier” and “modern” technologies [cf. 1977: 14]. Any technology is, understood as techne, a mode of aletheuein, of revealing, of unconcealment [cf. ibid: 13-14], but what makes modern technology different from earlier technical stages is that “the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such. […] The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order [bestellte] appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. […] But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon [stellt] nature. It sets upon in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry” [ibid: 14-15].

When Heidegger develops this idea, we find that the challenging inherent to modern technology is actually the kind of challenging that we can find in “modern physical theory”10, thus, to challenge nature means to relate to it as if it were objectively present, as

9 “Certainly for centuries we have acted as though the doctrine of the four causes had fallen from heaven as a truth as clear as daylight. But it might be that the time has come to ask, Why are there just four causes? In relation to the aforementioned four, what does 'cause' really mean? […] So long as we do not allow ourselves to go into these questions, causality, and with it instrumentality, and with the latter the accepted definition of technology, remain obscure and groundless. For a long time we have been accustomed to representing cause as that which brings something about. In this connection, to bring about means to obtain results, effects. The causa efficiens, but one among the four causes, sets the standard for all causality. […] Causa, casus, belongs to the verb cadere, 'to fall', and means that which brings it about that something falls out as a result in such and such a way. […] What we call cause [Ursache] and the Romans call causa, is called aition by the Greeks, that to which something else is indebted [das, was ein anderes verschuldet]. The four causes are the ways, all belonging at once to each other, of being responsible for something else. […] The Aristotelian doctrine neither knows the cause that ir named by this term [efficient] nor uses a Greek word that would correspond to it. The silversmith considers carefully and gathers together the three aforementioned ways of being responsible and indebted. […] The three previously mentioned ways of being responsible owe thanks to the pondering of the silversmith for the 'that' and the 'how' of their coming into appearance into play for the production of the sacrificial vessel” [cf. Heidegger, 1977: 6-8].

10 “After all, mathematical physics arose almost two centuries before technology. How, then, could it have already been set upon by modern technology and placed in its service? The facts testify to the contrary. Surely technology got under way only when it could be supported by exact physical science. Reckoned chronologically, this is correct. Thought historically, it does not hit upon the truth. The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology. For already in physics the challenging gathering-together into ordering revealing holds sway. But in it that gathering does not yet come expressly to appearance.

if it were something that can be measured, analyzed, organized according to probabilistic patterns, as if it were something which is an object in front of a subject and no longer a being at hand.

The movement from handiness to objective presence, from earlier to modern technology, entails also the displacement from one form of power to another and, above all, a deep change in the form of connection between power and knowledge, being the first a non-theoretical form of knowledge, a knowledge which emerges from practice, and the second a knowledge which is possible only through the detachment of the subject from the object, which is possible only if both entities are configured, produced, differentiated as such; a form of power-knowledge in which the subject has then the ability to study the object as such, to apprehend the inner laws that govern the behavior of the object, and to use that knowledge to manipulate the object.

2.c) From Heidegger to Foucault: power-knowledgeWhen we study Foucault's courses of the late 70's (specially Security, Territory

and Population) we face a complex conceptual scheme built up around three basic notions: biopolitics (or biopower), governmentality and security. The three are different but related forms of conceptualizing, total or partially, the kind of power which manifests itself when “population” becomes its object. Biopower is then the power exercised upon the constitutive biological features of human beings, so that, using Foucault's expression, political sovereignty no longer expresses itself as “letting live or making die” but as “making live or letting die” [cf. 1997: 214]11. But it seems to us that biopower is not a general feature of modern power but rather a concrete expression, result, consequence, development, of that modern form of power that we would say that is security. And security, at the same time, would be the consequence of a general transformation of the articulation of power and knowledge whose outcome is “governmentality”. Thus, the emergence of governmentality is the general phenomenon whose direct effect is the displacement from discipline to security, and then one of the concrete expressions, one of the specific developments of that displacement, of that general change, is the emergence of biopower or biopolitics.

It is important to notice that the notion of discipline doesn't mean exactly the same for Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1975) than later on in Security, Territory and Population (1977-1978). To say it in a few words, the notion “discipline” as it is used in 1975 splits up in two when we arrive to 1978, and becomes discipline on the one hand and security on the other. In 1978, we can say that discipline is the constitution of subjects, whereas security is the management of subjects that are already constituted as such.

We say that the meaning of discipline changes between these two works because in Discipline and Punish we move from the description of the process of the disciplinary constitution of subjects to the description of how those subjects are managed [cf. 2009: 277]. We move from the constitution of the subject-criminal to the management of crime as

Modern physics is the herald of Enframing [Ge-stell] […]. Chronologically speaking, modern physical science begins in the seventeenth century. In contrast, machine-power technology develops only in the second half of the eighteenth century. But modern technology, which for chronological reckoning is the later, is, from the point of view of the essence holding sway within it, the historically earlier. […] Because the essence of modern technology lies in Enframing, modern technology must employ exact physical science. Through its so doing, the deceptive illusion arises that modern technology is applied physical science. This illusion can maintain itself only so long as neither the essential origin of modern science nor indeed the essence of modern technology is adequatedly found out through questioning” [cf. ibid: 21-22, 23].

11 Dire que le souverain a droit de vie et de mort signifie, au fond, qu'il peut faire mourir et laisser vivre […]. Et je crois que, justement, une des plus massives transformations du droit politique au XIXe siècle a consisté, je ne dis pas exactement à substituer, mais à compléter, ce vieux droit de souveraineté -faire mourir ou laisser vivre- par un autre droit nouveau, qui ne va pas effacer le premier, mais qui va le pénétrer, le traverser, le modifier, et qui va être un droit, ou plutôt un pouvoir exactement inverse: pouvoir de “faire” vivre et de “laisser” mourir.

a “natural fact”12. We move, in other terms, from the disciplinary prison to the panopticon13.“In the dispositive of security”, Foucault writes, “[...] we take distance enough to

be able to grasp the point in which things are going to take place, whether they are desirable or not. This means that we are going to try to grasp them at the level of their nature, […] we are going to grasp them at the level of their effective reality” [Foucault, 2006: 48]14.

Political epistemology, the relation between power and truth, is the common background through which these two conceptual distinctions Zuhandenheit/Vorhandenheit, discipline/security, can be connected. Both entail the same progressive displacement, the same progressive detachment, the same progressive splitting up in two of a previously unitarian entity that becomes the object on the one hand and the subject on the other. The distinction, the opposition between both, is thus not simply the “mistake” of traditional ontology, it is not simply one of the main axes of modern philosophy, but a constitutive aspect of modern life and of the way in which it produces and reproduces itself.

It is not a pure epistemological or ontological issue what is at stake when Heidegger criticizes those who interpret Da-sein in the modes of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit. It is, above all, the political problem of how the distinction between subject and object means also the categorization of subjects as objects, means that Da-sein analyzes itself as objectively present and therefore applies on itself a specific form of power-knowledge.

3) Heidegger's theory of social contract.

3.a) From some thing to some one From the point of view of Heideggerian ontology, and according to what we have

seen up to now, the main structural characterization of Da-sein is care, Sorge. From it we can deduce that, in that taking care of..., the “world” is in some way already included in Da-sein itself as a category.

Then, taking care of something reveals itself then under a double form, Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, being the second one originally derivative from the first, despite of the traditional ontological interpretation of the subject-object relation. Thus, the concept of Da-sein, that in Heidegger's vocabulary has the function of substituting, and of 12 “In disciplines, our point of departure was a norm and it was in relation to that norm that we were able to distinguish

between the normal and the abnormal. There [in security], on the contrary, it is the normal what comes first and it is the norm that is deduced from it, it is on the basis of this study of normalities that the norm is fixed and plays its operative role” (Dans les disciplines, on partait d'une norme et c'est par rapport à ce dressage effectué para la norme que l'on pouvait ensuite distinguer le normal de l'anormal. Là, au contraire, […] c'est le normal qui est premier et c'est la norme qui s'en déduit, ou c'est à partir de cette étude des normalités que la norme se fixe et joue son rôle opératoire) [Foucault, 2004: 65].

13 The model of the panopticon is not exactly based on a disciplinary control of the subject but rather on a securitarian one; it is based not on the systematic, direct, action upon the behavior of the subject but rather on the previsibility of that behavior. The guard doesn't have to make the prisoner behave as if he is being watched, doesn't have to teach, to impose, that behavior; on the contrary, the guard already knows what is going to be the behavior of the prisoner once he is in the cell because he already knows what kind of behavior he must have [cf. 2009: 203-208].This doesn't mean that the panopticon is not disciplinary at all, but only that security has a preeminent role that Foucault couldn't make explicit yet in 1975. As Foucault states, “if we take the security mechanisms as they are being developed nowadays, it is absolutely evident that this doesn't mean at all the bracketing or the cancellation of juridical-legal structures nor of the disciplinary mechanisms” (Si l'on prend les mécanismes de sécurité tels qu'on essaie de les développer à l'époque contemporaine, il est absolument évident que ça ne constitue aucunement une mise entre parenthèses ou une annulation des structures juridico-légales ou des mécanismes disciplinaires) [Foucault, 2004: 9].

14 Dans le dispositif de sécurité tel que je viens de vous l'exposer […] ce dont il s'agit c'est de ne prendre ni le point de vue de ce qui est empêché ni le point de vue de ce qui est obligatoire, mais de prendre suffisamment le recul pour que l'on puisse saisir le point où les choses vont se produire, qu'elles soient souhaitables ou qu'elles en le soient pas. C'est-à-dire qu'on va essayer de les ressaisir au niveau de leur nature […], qu'on va les prendre au niveau de leur réalité effective.

re-interpreting, what in philosophy is traditionally called “man”, “human being”, “individual”, includes in itself subject and object, soul and nature, and it is, in the logical development of the argument, previous to both distinctions and thus in the last instance different from both and from their combination.

But all this argument belongs to the analysis of the mode in which Da-sein takes care of something and not of someone. And as far as Heidegger moves from the scrutiny of taking care of something to taking care of someone, he moves from political epistemology to, if we can call it like that, political sociology.

“The clarification of being-in-the-world”, Heidegger writes, “showed that a mere subject without a world 'is' not initially and is also never given. And, thus, an isolated I without the others is in the end just as far from being given initially. But if the 'others' are always already there with us in being-in-the-world, ascertaining this phenomenally, too, must not mislead us into thinking that the ontological structure of what is thus 'given' is self-evident and not in need of an investigation. The task is to make this Mitda-sein of the nearest everydayness phenomenally visible and to interpret it in an ontologically adequate way” [1996: 116].

It is extremely important to outline a certain interpretation of this discursive movement in Being and Time, a movement of enormous significance within Heidegger's philosophical system. We have to do so having in mind that the work itself is an attempt to synthesize Heidegger's critique of traditional ontology and, from that point, of all the philosophical tradition as such; the incorrect interpretation of the meaning of Being, unavoidable point of departure of any further statement, makes inevitably incorrect the final outcome of the argument, even though it can be dealing with a purely ontical issue, like for example political theory.

In this paradoxical movement between the ontic and the ontological, between philosophy and politics, Heidegger introduces as a key ontological issue the social dimension of human existence. Thus, Heidegger establishes a silent, unspoken, debate with the philosophical tradition he is related to in at least two different levels: first of all, he puts at stake the traditional perception of “the social” as an ontical realm without ontological implications; and then, once “the social” itself has been “ontologized”, Heidegger's argument can be read within that philosophical tradition, within the debate that traditionally articulates the philosophical analysis of “the social”.

We can at the same time read Heidegger's argument from the opposite perspective and say that it is in this moment when he definitely “forces” the irruption of ontology into politics, when he posits with more clarity the impossibility of an universal definition of the meaning of Being.

In any case, and to reveal explicitly the implicit discussion in which Heidegger gets involved, we would like to propose that these sections of Being and Time we are going to talk about can be read (must be read, even) as a sort of contribution to, of incursion in, the field of the social contract theories and the conceptualization of the state of nature.

3.b) Heidegger and “the social”: a critical dialogue with political philosophyFirst of all, we should pay attention to the social contract theory as such,

independently of the concrete formulation that each author gives to it. In a broad sense, thus, the social contract theory has a heuristic, theoretical function of huge significance: to replace, or at least displace, the biblical myth.

Human society, and thus human history, is not going to be explained with the help of religious beliefs, but according to its own nature; it is thus one of the first expressions of the feeling of immanency so closely related to the rise and development of modernity. Facing the lack of a complete historical knowledge, this theoretical fiction is “scientific” enough to put the religious myth at stake and to make an abstract description of human

condition upon which we can explain the origin of our social life. The clear (and paradoxical) theological roots of the idea of immanency, a notion

which is present in the intrinsic conflict of the Judaic Alliance with Yahweh and even more in Christian theology once God becomes flesh and thus recognizes the independence (and interrelation) between religious and secular power, is explicitly recovered in Heideggerian ontology through the notion of Geworfenheit. Usually translated into English as “thrownness”, it could be also understood as “dereliction” (Dereliktion), a word of Latin root which is used traditionally in theology to define the condition of Christ when he is crucified (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” -Matthew, 27:46-)15.

If Heidegger philosophy is equally indebted to Hegel, Nietzsche and Kant, then probably one of the points in which he is being strongly Kantian is in his way of facing the social contract issue:

Though all the social contract theorists are in some way aware of the scientific feebleness of their theories as far as there is not empirical proof or historical evidence, all of them are so dependent on their theory of human nature that they can't recognize with absolute openness the fragility of their standing point (however strong it could be in front of the biblical myth). As Foucault states in relation to Hobbes [cf. 1997: 77-96], there was a far more important political rival to defeat through this theoretical account of society: it is in opposition to the Medieval account on history, an account which revealed that the State was the product of a long history of violence and war, it is in opposition to it that the social contract theory emerges as a form of erasing that concrete historicity, the ultimate source of legitimacy for the ruling aristocracy (and of political memory for the lower classes), replacing it with a peaceful act of will, a contract called to protect and grant the rule of the emergent bourgeoisie.

Kant has, in front of that tradition of thought, a critical stance which can also be explained by the fact that he is writing once the bourgeois revolutions have been more or less accomplished (in different ways, with different degrees of success and with different results) in different European countries. He also recurs in certain occasions to the state of nature as a heuristic tool, but he is at the same time who defined with more clarity the limits of that tool and the way in which it was detached from the factual history that should be the source of really scientific knowledge about humanity [cf. Kant, 2009b].

Heidegger is, we think, fully aware of that critique, and his direct opposition to any kind of essentialist conceptualization of human being reinforces that critical stance and clearly determines the way in which he is going to face the problem of “the social”.

Heidegger's approach to “the social” as a being-with which is given and therefore previous and independent of any kind of conscious agreement puts at stake liberal individualism in the same way as his political epistemology undermined positive science and its unquestioned validity; thus, the primordial mode of being of Da-sein is not theory nor practice, and is not individual nor collective.

From this point of departure, Heidegger's analysis of the “everyday” mode of being-with again takes distance from the social contract theories because it is not pretending to describe a moment in illo tempore from which we don't even have a trace (like Rousseau), nor to think it with the help of the small evidences that we still retain with us (like Hobbes). On the contrary, Heidegger's analysis of being-with is, in the straightest sense of the expression, an exercise of “concrete ontology”. It is an ontological analysis because it is rooted in the ontological structure of the being of Da-sein, and thus it is not considered as a pure ontic, contingent, fact; it is concrete because, despite its generality, it

15 The first translation into Spanish of Being and Time, made by José Gaos, is for almost all the matters less good than the more recent one, made by Eduardo Rivera; however, we think that one of the most interesting things of that translation is the use of “derelicción” for saying “Geworfenheit”, expressing the clear theological echo of the german word, usually missed in the translation.

still entails the description of certain aspects of “the social” that can't be taken (and Heidegger doesn't) as ahistorical, aspects that, on the contrary, can just be thought in the context of modern mass society.

The everyday mode of being-with is called by Heidegger “the They” (das Man). The first trace that defines the They is distantiality [1996: 126]. “I” am not “They”, but what “I” do is always referring to “them”, to “the others” with which my action can be either in consonance or in conflict. Thus, “the social” is not characterized either by cooperation or by conflict, there is not a Hobbesian nor a Rousseaunian state of nature, but an intrinsic tension between those two possible modes of relating to others16. To that feature other two are added: averageness17 and levelling down18. All the three can be synthesized under the notion of “publicness”19. Thus, the They disburdens Da-sein (takes it its will, its autonomy) [cf. ibid: 127] and thus “accomodates Da-sein in its tendency to take things easily and make them easy” [cf. ibid: 128]20.

“Existing”, Heidegger concludes, “in the modes we have mentioned, the self of one's own Da-sein and the self of the other have neither found nor lost themselves. One is in the manner of dependency and inauthenticity” [ibid: loc. cit.]. A little bit later, he adds that “the They is an existential and belongs as a primordial phenomenon to the positive constitution of Da-sein. It itself has, in turn, various possibilities of concretion in accordance with Da-sein. The extent to which its dominance becomes penetrating and explicit may change historically. The self of everyday Da-sein is the they-self which we distinguish from the authentic self, the self which has explicitly grasped itself” [ibid: 129].

Despite the obscurity, on the other hand frequent, of Heidegger's argument, in certain passages of this section 27 it becomes specially clear that Heidegger is not, not only, speaking about the They as a structural feature of Da-sein but rather of its historical concreteness in post-war Germany, this is, of mass society. He writes, for example, concerning averageness, that “we enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the 'great mass' the way they withdraw, we find 'shocking' what they find shocking” [ibid: 126].

3.c) Authenticity : from what is to what should be But the fact that “the social”, the “being-with”, is the premise and not the

conclusion of Heidegger's theory of social contract (let's call it that way), doesn't mean that there is not a change, a movement, a project, that leads us from what “is” (“human nature” in the philosophical tradition) to what “should be” (“civil society” in that tradition).

The key component of these theories, also of Heidegger's, is human will. That is the ultimate foundation of social order and legitimacy, the voluntary subordination of the people's acts to the people's will. Nothing about conquest, nothing about violence. Power dissociates itself from violence and, employing in a slightly different sense Weber's terminology [cf. 2002], Macht becomes Herrschaft or rather the first disappears, is replaced, by the second one. In any case, it is in that constitutive moment of society, in the moment in which a decision is needed, when power emerges as a concept in these theories, when power manifests itself as the unavoidable rule of Leviathan or as the unquestionable rationality of general will.

16 The Kantian influence on Heidegger is again clear at this point, being Heidegger's conceptualization of the social so near to Kant's “unsocial sociability” [2009a: 37].

17 “This being-with-one-another dissolves one's own Da-sein completely into the kind of being of 'the others' in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more” [Heidegger, 1996: 126].

18 “Overnight, everything primordial is flattered down as something long since known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes something to be manipulated. Every mystery loses its power” [ibid: 127].

19 “Publicness obscures everything, and then claims that what has been thus covered over is what is familiar and accessible to everybody” [ibid: loc. cit.].

20 Italics are ours.

For Heidegger, however, will can't be the most important notion. The willing subject of social contract theories is incompatible with the radical critique of the subject/object distinction that we have analyzed in the previous epigraph. And despite this fact, Heidegger seems to vindicate the need of recovering Da-sein's will, Da-sein's autonomy, that has been appropriated by the They. And thus there must be a change if Da-sein has to recover its autonomy, a change that won't take the form of the movement from the natural to the civil state (because “the social” is always already there) but that of the movement from inauthentic to authentic existence.

“Authenticity” is understood by Heidegger as the mode of being of Da-sein when it has properly understood the meaning of Being. And thus, as the meaning of Being is already always known in some way by Da-sein, grasping it properly is not a matter of making a decision, not even a sort of a Platonic “anamnesis” (which would maybe still be too active), but just a matter of responding Being's call (Ruf) [cf. 1996: 275-280]. In so doing, Da-sein understands that the meaning of Being is temporality (Zeitlichkeit), which means finiteness, which means that the being of Da-sein is always a being-towards-death (Sein-zum-Tode).

Then, through this series of deductions, inauthenticity as a social issue reveals itself as a problem that has to do with the form in which Da-sein, as far as it is under the influence of the They, faces its own finiteness. And we think, despite the possible “individualistic” interpretations of this issue, that for Heidegger it is not a matter (not only, not mainly at least) of how an individual faces the possibility of its own death but rather how a society as a whole faces its own contingency, the possibility of its disappearance.

The question is, then, how does inauthenticity present itself, within the mode of being of the They, when it becomes specifically a form of facing temporality, a form of facing death, a form of facing finiteness. Heidegger puts it as follows: “The publicness of everyday being-with-one-another 'knows' death as a constantly occurring event, as a 'case of death'. Someone or another 'dies', be it a neighbor or a stranger. People unknown to us 'die' daily and hourly. 'Death' is encountered as a familiar event occurring within the world. […] The they has also already secured an interpretation for this event. The 'fleeting' talk about this which is either expressed or else mostly kept back says: One also dies at the end, but for now one is not involved. […] “Dying” is levelled down to an event which does concern Da-sein, but which belongs to no one in particular. […] With such ambiguity, Da-sein puts itself in the position of losing itself in the they with regard to an eminent potentiality-of-being that belongs to its own self. The they justifies and aggravates the temptation of covering over for itself its ownmost being-toward-death. […] Thus, the they makes sure of a constant tranquilization about death […] But along with this tranquilization, which keeps Da-sein away from its death, the they at the same time justifies itself and makes itself respectable by silently ordering the way in which one is supposed to behave toward death in general. Even 'thinking about death' is regarded publicly as cowardly fear, a sign of insecurity on the part of Da-sein and a dark flight from the world. The they does not permit to have Angst about death. The dominance of the public interpretedness of the they has already decided what attunement [Befindlichkeit] is to determine our stance toward death. In Angst about death, Da-sein is brought before itself as delivered over to its possibility not-to-be-bypassed. The they is careful to distort this Angst into the fear of a future event” [ibid: 253-254].

Thus, the inauthenticity that characterizes the “everydayness” of social life is that, even though there is a “factical” being-towards-death21, we can say that we live in an ambiguous, paradoxical concealment of that fact. In its inauthentic mode of being, Da-sein conceals, ignores, its own finiteness, its own being-towards-death, turning death into something that only appears as objectively present and thus as something that only can

21 “Factically one's own Da-sein is always already dying, that is, it is in a being-toward-its-end” [ibid: 254].

happen to others as an accomplished fact, but not in oneself as a process.

3.d) Fear and Angst If we summarize what we have said until here, we can almost completely depict

what we have been calling the Heideggerian theory of social contract. Distancing himself from the traditional conceptualization of social contract, Heidegger makes two main changes: the first one is his avoidance of the “state of nature” as a point of departure, replacing it by an obscure description of “the social” as we face it in mass societies; the second one is, as a consequence of his critique of modern (Cartesian) subject, his avoidance of “will” as the key factor that makes decision possible, replacing it by the action of “answering” the call. Then, “to answer the call”, to understand properly the meaning of Being, turns to depend on the way in which we face death, the way in which we assume the unavoidable finiteness of our being.

The difference between authenticity and inauthenticity is thus the difference between answering or not answering the call, and therefore is the difference between feeling fear (Furcht) or Angst about death. This is, we think, an useful conceptual distinction; and we will try to prove, to explain that usefulness later.

Fear (analyzed for the first time by Heidegger in section 30) is characterized by the fact that “that before which we are afraid, the 'fearsome', is always something encountered within the world, either with the kind of being of something at hand or something objectively present or Mitda-sein” [ibid: 140]. On the contrary, Angst (see section 40) is felt about something that “cannot be grasped as something 'fearsome'; because anything fearsome is always encountered as an innerwordly being” [ibid: 185] and therefore we feel fear and not Angst about it. “Thus neither does Angst 'see' a definite 'there' and 'over here' from which what is threatening approaches. The fact that what is threatening is nowhere characterizes what Angst is about. Angst 'does not know' what it is about which it is anxious. But 'nowhere' does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot approach from a definite direction within nearness, it is already 'there' -and yet nowhere. […] So if what Angst is about exposes nothing, that is, the world as such, this means that that about which Angst is anxious is being-in-the-world itself” [ibid: 186-187]. Thus, Angst is a more primordial form of being-in than fear, because Angst discloses being-in-the-world as such, whereas fear discloses certain beings. Therefore, Angst “makes fear possible” [ibid: 186].

For Heidegger Angst is, as a mode of being-in, of utmost theoretical significance. “Angst takes away from Da-sein the possibility of understanding itself […] in terms of the 'world' and the public way of being interpreted” [ibid: 187]; this means that it detaches Da-sein from its “surrounding world” and therefore makes Da-sein able to avoid the main mistake of tradition ontology, namely the interpretation of Da-sein through the being of beings unlike Da-sein. “It throws”, Heidegger continues, “Da-sein back upon that for which it is anxious, its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world. […] Angst discloses Da-sein as being-possible […]. Angst reveals in Da-sein its being toward its ownmost potentiality of being, that is, being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping itself. Angst brings Da-sein before its being free for... (propensio in), the authenticity of its being as possibility which it always already is” [ibid: 187-188].

Thus, if we come back to the problem of authenticity and finiteness, we can see clearly that in feeling Angst towards being-in-the-world, in having the chance to interpret itself freely, Da-sein is feeling Angst towards death, and therefore it is in facing death, in facing the unavoidable finiteness of existence, that Da-sein can become authentic and make the decision of living, of existing, authentically:

“Being-toward-death is the anticipation [Vorlaufen] of a potentiality-of-being of that

being whose kind of being is anticipation itself. In the anticipatory revealing of this potentiality-of-being, Da-sein discloses itself to itself with regard to its most extreme possibility. But to project oneself upon one's ownmost potentiality of being means to be able to understand oneself in the being of the being thus revealed: to exist. Anticipation shows itself as the possibility of understanding one's ownmost and extreme potentiality-of-being, that is, as the possibility of authentic existence. […] Anticipation reveals to Da-sein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility to be itself, primarily unsupported by concern taking care of things, but to be itself in passionate anxious freedom toward death which is free of the illusions of the they, factical, and certain of itself” [ibid: 262-263, 266]22.

3.e) Authenticity and decision As we can see, the turning point, the key moment in which power reveals itself in

Heidegger's text is full of paradoxes as far as it entails a subjective position which is not exactly active nor passive. It is not active because, as we saw, the turn from inauthenticity to authenticity doesn't involve any kind of subjective “will”, but only an act of realization of something that Da-sein already knew. On the other hand, it is not passive because the realization of the meaning of Being, the anticipation of death, doesn't mean to wait for until death comes but rather to throw oneself forward, and therefore it is to make a decision.

But what is the purpose of that decision? What is the outcome of the change from inauthentic to authentic existence? In comparison to the traditional theories of social contract, Heidegger's explanation of that “authentic” mode of social existence (see section 74) is rather short and obscure.

A new paradox appears here: though one could think that, in facing death, Da-sein becomes free to choose to do whatever it would really like to do (“I am going to live just one time, so let's enjoy the time I have”), what it truly happens is that facing finiteness “brings Da-sein to the simplicity of its fate” [ibid: 384]. So again the apparently active role of Da-sein, which would manifest itself in the capacity of decision, is limited or put at stake by the fact that this decision is already defined by Da-sein's fate. If Da-sein already knows in some way the meaning of Being, if it already knows in some way that its existence is finite, it already knows in some way the decision it has to make. And still, despite this apparent passivity, the decision has not been made yet, the decision must be made.

This section is one of the few moments in which a certain vocabulary of power appears in Being and Time. “When Da-sein […]”, Heidegger writes, “lets death become powerful in itself, as free for death it understands itself in its own higher power, the power of its finite freedom, and takes over the powerlessness of being abandoned to itself in that freedom, which always only is in having chosen the choice […]. But if fateful Da-sein essentially exists as being-in-the-world in being-with others, its occurrence is an occurrence-with and is determined as destiny. With this term, we designate the occurrence of the community, of a people. Destiny is not composed of individual fates, nor can being-with-one-another be conceived of as the mutual occurrence of several subjects. These fates are already guided beforehand in being-with-one-another in the same world and in the resoluteness for definite possibilities. In communication and in battle the power of

22 It is important to notice the problem that entails to translate Vorlaufen as “anticipation”, being its literal meaning “running ahead”: “'Anticipation' and 'to anticipate' refer primarily to a mental activity, whereas the phrase 'to run (ahead)' is primarily used for a physical motion. In German this difference is even more pronounced, for antizipieren (also vorwegnehmen and vorhersehen) exclusively designates mental activities and never physical motions, whereas 'vorlaufen' is used exclusively for physical motions and never for mental ones. Furthermore, if one anticipates (antizipiert, vorhersieht) some situation or event, one assumes that there is a temporal difference between the moment of anticipation and the occurrence of the anticipated situation. […] However, with vorlaufen one does just the opposite. Someone läuft vor when he leaves a group, a place, or a house he has been in so far and runs out, alone, into the open. In doing so one often exposes oneself to insecurities and dangers from which one had previously been protected by the group or house” [Fritsche, 1999: 2].

destiny first becomes free” [ibid: loc. cit.]. It is because of this articulation between fate (Schicksal) and destiny (Geschick)

that we can't understand (as we have said before in these pages) the problem of finiteness from a purely individual perspective. It is not the end of one's own, individual, life what is at stake (not only), but rather the finiteness of an epoch as such; and then the individual fate is linked to the collective destiny, and in the collective level we face the same paradox that we analyzed in the individual one. The collective Da-sein already knows that its epoch is finite, that its epoch will not last forever, that each day it is nearer to its end; and in facing that fact, in fully understanding the meaning of Being, the collective Da-sein becomes able to choose its mode of existence, it can choose to live authentically. If it does so, however, it is not having the chance to choose among an infinite field of possibilities, but rather assuming the destiny that has already emerged in the moment in which Da-sein has faced its finiteness.

And in facing finiteness, Da-sein faces historicity and temporality, and thus the articulation between past, present and future; therefore, and in a rather Nietzschean mood, Heidegger affirms that the concrete content of that destiny will be based on the recovery of previous possibilities (“going back to the possibilities of the Da-sein that has been there”), on “choosing its heroes” [ibid: 385]. This recovery of the past, however, is not a pure restoration; it “neither brings back 'what is past', nor does it bind the 'present' back to what is 'outdated'” [ibid: 385-386]; it “responds to the possibility of existence that has-been-there. But responding to the possibility in a resolution is at the same time, as in the Moment, the disavowal of what is working itself out today as the 'past'” [ibid: 386]. It “neither abandons itself to the past, nor does it aim at progress. In the Moment, authentic existence is indifferent to both of these alternatives” [ibid: loc. cit.]

If we try to read this moment of change, this point in which decision (as limited as it is) emerges, from the perspective of power, what we have is that to feel Angst means to realize the feebleness of the situation, that we face something powerless and therefore we can become powerful.

As we have seen, the inauthentic mode of being related to the They is based on the fiction of the powerfulness, of the infiniteness, of the epoch. If the They is successful, the feeling of Angst before the weakness of the authority becomes a feeling of fear before the unlimited power that that authority seems to have despite its factical contingency.

This theorization of the limits of obedience, of the limits of the effectiveness of power, based on the link between the notions of fear and contingency, is not at all original. It is not original either the fact that, independently of the original Angst upon which the political power is built, obedience is thought as a “voluntary” condition. The clear precedent is Hobbes.

For him, the state of nature is characterized by a constant fear (we would say Angst in Heideggerian vocabulary) towards the absolute contingency of life. It is in facing the finiteness of social existence as it is given in the state of nature, in facing the impossibility of building up a prosper and lasting life, that men assume that they have the unavoidable destiny of instituting an absolute power (Leviathan) that will be able to set justice; therefore, the State is for Hobbes a product of will (not of conquest) but at the same time it is not exactly a free option, but rather the only option that individuals have once they face their true condition.

At the same time, however, there is a clear limit to the absolute obedience that each individual must offer to the State: the State's own finiteness. If it becomes unable to maintain and reproduce the conditions in which the subjects can believe that the political order will last forever, if the subjects can again face the possibility of death, they are again potentially empowered in front of a powerless authority and therefore can throw it down and build up a new one. While the State can exercise an unquestioned power, the subjects

can have fear; in the moment in which it is incapable of doing so, the subjects face a feeling of Angst that can lead to the destruction of the existing social order.

3.f) Heidegger and Ferrero: the politics of fearContemporary political theory has clearly abandoned the “social contract” formula

(maybe with the exception of Rawls and his theory of justice). It is probably due to the fact that, with the development of a more and more rigorous historiography, it becomes “scientifically unacceptable” to build up a “historical fiction” that is going to be the basis of a general theory of society and power. In a certain way, it seems that Kant's clear distinction between any kind of heuristic fiction about the beginning of human societies and the purely scientific historiography has been fully accepted by social sciences.

Facing that radical critique, we have Rawls' purely formalist recovery of the idea of social contract. We have, too, Heidegger's implicit dialogue with this philosophical tradition; and his way of assuming Kant's critique is to avoid the “state of nature” and to take instead the society of his time as the point of departure from which the “contract” emerges under the form of destiny. And there is a third case, a really interesting one:

Guglielmo Ferrero, an Italian historian who lived between 1871 and 1942, employed the last years of his life in writing an essay which was not exactly about History but rather about political theory [cf. 1998]. The book, whose title could be translated as “Power: The Invisible Genies of the City”, reflects on political power through the notion of legitimacy, that here is not exactly used in a Weberian sense but as a synonym of voluntary obedience; it follows the political history of Europe since 1789 until the rise of fascism, and explores how the emergence of the idea of legitimacy as a political concept (this is, the idea that the only acceptable government is the one which is legitimate, voluntarily accepted by the subjects) gives rise to deep political changes.

Before beginning that historico-political sequence, the author dedicates a couple of chapters to make his own description of a “state of nature”. His way of assuming Kant's critique, which he can't avoid because as a historian he is presupposing the possibility and the need of a scientific knowledge about the human history, is to introduce his reflection on the state of nature as a pure induction. Far more empiricist than Hobbes (who recurs to reality just to find some proofs if someone wants them), for Ferrero historical knowledge and experience is not just a proof but the material upon which he can legitimately build up a scientific theory about human society and nature.

The idea of fear plays a key role in this general theory, an is even a fundamental component of Ferrero's definition of Power: “Power”, he says, “is the ultimate manifestation of the fear that man produces upon himself in his vain effort of liberating himself from terror” [ibid: 90]. Fear is the reason and the outcome of a never-ending process in which human being uses power “as a weapon to defend himself against the two major terrors that lash humanity: anarchy and war” [ibid: 91].

The deepest reason for that unending fear among humans is the fact that “in the kingdom of nature and life, man is who most suffers and provokes fear because he is the only living being who has a clear and precise idea of that dark maelstrom towards which the torrent of life is falling unavoidably: death” [ibid: 88]23.

Therefore, naked power, pure coercion, can be used to control fear, but it can produce it too.”Coercion can reduce men to obedience, but it can trigger revolt too” [ibid: 92]. Due to this fact, there is a reciprocal fear: “men are afraid of the Power that is subjugating them and Power comes to a point in which it is afraid of the pretension of rebellion of those subjugated men” [ibid: 93].

In front of this situation of naked power, legitimacy “exorcises fear” [ibid: 96], establishing with clarity the foundations of the “right of command” and of the “duty of obedience” [cf. ibid: loc. cit.]. Therefore, “a legitimate government is a Power that has set

23 The similarity between Heidegger's and Ferrero's position is clear in this point.

itself free from fear because governors have learned to sustain themselves on the active or passive consent of those who are being governed, and to reduce proportionally the use of force” [ibid: 98]. That means, therefore, that this government has been able to hide, to erase, its unavoidable contingency and finiteness, it has been able to hide death.

“But”, Ferrero adds, “if accidentally this principle of legitimacy came suddenly down, the ancestral fear, the fear that is inherent and co-substantial to Power, the always present and always latent fear to the rebellion of the subjects, would explode again with the violence of an unexpected return to origins” [ibid: 99].

Based on this analysis, Ferrero studies French contemporary political history as a product of the recurrent coming back of fear, due to the crisis of the aristocratic-monarchic legitimacy and the difficulties of the democratic-elective legitimacy to become hegemonic.

Ferrero analysis is doubtlessly suggestive and useful, but in the times we live, a theory of power so strongly based in the principle of fear is at the same time a very useful and very problematic tool. The reason of this ambivalence is the fact that the word “fear” is actually referring to two different notions that Heidegger distinguishes as “Angst” and “fear” (Furcht); or, to put it in a different form, that the fear that causes power is not of the same nature as the fear that is produced by naked power. If we don't find a way to distinguish between both, we can't fully interpret specific cases in which fear is a intrinsic part of a political process. Let's use two different examples to show that problem: the politics of fear developed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks; and the financial panic that we are experiencing since 2008.

As we all know, the Bush administration made a explicit political use of fear, specially between 2001 and 2005. The 9/11 attacks had doubtlessly produced a situation of strong political anxiety in the United States and abroad; it was perfectly understandable, because it had been impossible to predict or imagine that two airplanes could be used to attack two skyscrapers by a transnational terrorist group with relatively small resources.

That was a huge menace coming from nowhere. Impossible to trace, to predict, to calculate. And that situation surely caused fear. However, from that moment onwards a huge set of measures were taken national and internationally: stronger security controls in airports all around the world, discriminatory policies of immigration that made from every Muslim a potential terrorist, two military interventions (Afghanistan and Iraq) whose purpose was apparently to restore safety, laws that redefined the rights of privacy and the capacity of the State to suspend certain legal guarantees if it were necessary for the sake of national security.

That is what we use to call “politics of fear”, but this fear is different from the previous one. In a certain way, this fear is produced and controlled by State institutions in order to preserve, to protect, the established order. Actually, and despite the fact that we could agree with Ferrero on the fact that fear normally undermines legitimacy, it can be said that the security measures have protected the established order and its legitimacy: we can say that not only because George W. Bush was re-elected (that could be explained by other facts than the effectiveness of the politics of fear) but also (and more importantly) because we still trust planes and skyscrapers.

If we think that objectively for one moment, there is nothing in the stronger security measures that makes impossible any kind of terrorist attack similar to 9/11; absolutely nothing. What is so dangerous, so worrying about terrorism, about asymmetric warfare in a broader sense, is that it is almost impossible to face it effectively; even if a complete state of exception is declared, still we can't be totally sure about our victory. This kind of terrorist attacks have made evident the limits of our social order, its contingency, its finiteness; and that had to be solved. Using Heideggerian vocabulary, we can say that people's Angst, people's anxious facing of contingency and finiteness, was successfully turned into fear towards certain absolutely meaningless “security breaches”. And thus, for some reason

hard to understand, we feel safe taking a plane if we pass through two security controls instead of one when, as we all know, the potential terrorists could be patient and become the official pilots of the flight. Even the xenophobic reaction against Muslim population is already a way of turning Angst into fear, of giving it a concrete object, of making it controllable.

In the case of our financial crisis we face more or less the same problem, and the relation between legitimacy and fear becomes clearer. In the 9/11 case, the political crisis was product of an unpredictable attack, nothing could have been done to avoid it. In the case of the financial crisis, however, the crucial event that breaks the legitimacy of the economical system is a problem of trust. Panic expands extremely fast and in a few days the whole financial system has collapsed, but everything could have been solved, in the first instance, just if the first person to be afraid had just thought it for a moment: if he says nothing, the economic game can keep on going infinitely. Isn't it? Actually, the first who panicked had probably thought that possibility, but at the same time he had surely told himself that there was not too much chance to avoid the end of the speculative bubble.

In the first months of the economic crisis almost everything was possible. The system was literally collapsing under our feet and we could even hear Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of the French Republic, saying that it was necessary to “refund capitalism”. Left movements saw the crisis as a crucial moment for political action and took the chance to defend the necessity of a deep revision of economical policies and of the neo-liberal paradigm.

Not too much time afterwards, however, everything turned darker. Incredible amounts of money, taken from public funds, were suddenly given, without any expectations of recovering that investment, to financial institutions that had been involved in the subprime mortgages affair. After that, the public debt is so high that countries like Greece or Spain are being literally sold out. “Concrete fears” appeared; fear to lose our jobs, fear to lose our houses... And between 2008 and 2011, three long years of economic depression and political incompetence, people did nothing (maybe with the exception of Greece, where massive public protests began in 2010). And suddenly one day something happened in the most unexpected place: in Tunis and Egypt massive popular protests produced fast and strong political changes. Revolt started in the place where it was absolutely unthinkable, and it put again at stake the re-constructed infiniteness of social order, it revealed the contingency of our epoch, the possibility of its end. We know very well the rest: massive political movements across Europe and specially in Spain and Greece; even in the United States massive political protests rose up.

“We don't have fear!”. That's something people usually cry in demonstrations in Spain; but that doesn't mean that we have a plan, that we know what to do, that everything is absolutely clear. We don't have fear, that's true; but we do have Angst.

Thus, gathering together Ferrero and Heidegger, we could say that Power is that what human beings use to face Angst and to set the conditions of possibility of progress. Legitimacy appears then as the political form under which the They is able to conceal politically the contingency and feebleness of the existing political order. However, for inherent or contingent reasons, a crisis of legitimacy can take place and therefore the feebleness of the system becomes evident and the political institutions become powerless in front of the potential powerfulness of the anxious subjects. In that context, only fear (which doesn't mean exactly or only repression) can preserve the established order, through the identification of certain “innerworldly beings” upon which it is possible to project the general feeling of Angst, neutralizing it.

The inherent danger of that tactic is that, in managing fear as a political tool, political institutions are explicitly recognizing that a crisis is taking place, and if the tactic is

not effective it can turn against its users, reinforcing the rebelling groups.However, and in any case, what is sure is that there is an unquestionable

ontological contingency, and that therefore any epoch, any order, will fall down sooner or later. That doesn't mean, however, that what comes afterwards, if it comes, will be better.

Conclusion: wrong solutions for the right problems.

As we said in the first pages of this text, our attempt to read Heidegger politically didn't have as purpose, as it has been done so many times, to explore the way in which his political engagement with National-Socialism can be grasped in his philosophical works. We have tried to read him as a political philosopher whose contributions can be (and maybe have already been) used with a relative independence from the political orientation of the person who uses them.

In that general sense, we find that Heidegger's “political ontology” (if we can call it in that way) is a rather systematic and critical approach to the founding conflicts of modern societies. Analyzed as a thinker of his time, as Pierre Bourdieu [cf. 1998] or Johannes Fritsche [cf. 1999] have done, he loses part of his originality because we realize that he is to some extent repeating what others have said before or at the same time in other fields as intellectuals or simply as German citizens involved in social and political movements; but at the same time he gains a certain significance because, within this historical context, Heideggerian philosophy systematizes, unifies and reflects the political effervescence of Interwar Germany.

For this reason we think that Heidegger identified and analyzed with success some of the major issues that we still have to discuss today, at the beginning of the 21st

century: the relation between subject and object, between knowledge and power, between philosophy and science, between truth and authority, between the individual and the community, between power and fear...

However, and as we have also affirmed repeatedly through these pages, Heidegger is developing a “concrete philosophy”. And though it is “concrete” in the sense that it somehow is reflecting upon modern times, we think that its primary object of reflection was not modern times as such, but a far more concrete situation: Germany during the Weimar Republic.

In this sense, Heidegger is not only defining and analyzing problems, but also giving solutions. Solutions that can remain hidden behind the obscurity of Heideggerian philosophical rhetoric, but that have been revealed by all those scholars that have tried to “read Heidegger between lines” to show the way in which his political compromise was already visible in his philosophical work.

In that sense, his critique of technology, of modern urban life, his emphasis on care and handiness, can be read as a philosophical way of manifesting his own political position as a German conservative man coming from the countryside. This political engagement becomes even clearer when we analyze under this light his analysis of temporality; as Johannes Fritsche shows convincingly [cf. 1999: 3], the anticipation of death is enunciated in Being and Time under a form that was thought to remind the reader the expression “Entschlossen in den Tod vorlaufen” (to resolutely run ahead into death); used during the First World War to praise the suicidal behavior of patriotic young German soldiers who left the trenches to encounter death. These were the “Helden von Langemarck” (heroes of Langemarck); probably those heroes that Heidegger thought that the German Da-sein had to choose in his movement towards authenticity.

The paradoxical philosophical stance of Heidegger is not as infrequent as it could seem. On the one hand, because it is in some way shared by other German conservative

revolutionaries such as Ernst Jünger or Carl Schmitt; all of them show a brilliant insight, a strong critical stand in front of liberalism and capitalist economy, and a stronger opposition to radical left groups. On the other, because it was in a certain way the kind of political paradox that made possible the rise of National-Socialism; as the historian Peter Fritzsche has shown in his book Germans into Nazis [cf. 2009], what characterized German society since the beginning of First World War was the emergence of masses (the They) as a political subject; after the war, even those who were radically opposed to the Weimar Republic assumed mass politics as an instrument that had to be used; the Nazi Party won, according to Fritzsche, the elections not because of all the conservative traces that made it similar to the rest of conservative, anti-republican political parties, but because it was deeply different inasmuch as it assumed that major political changes had been taking place in Germany since 1914 and inasmuch as it acted consequently in relation to that unquestionable fact.

If something characterized German conservatives during this period was their nostalgia about the war, about the way in which it was able to unify the German nation and to dissolve temporally its inner social conflicts. Heidegger's philosophy, specially Being and Time, is strongly dependent on that nostalgia; probably that fact can explain some of the strangest features of Heideggerian ontology.

But still we would like to defend again that his philosophy is more than an anecdotal response to the problems of his time, that he was really able to grasp the problems of his time, which are not so different from the ones that we have to face today.

This paper wants to be an attempt to show that Heideggerian philosophy can be used in a non-Heideggerian sense (politically speaking). That diagnostics can be detached, though not without problems, from the solutions they originally entail. That Heidegger can be read politically, and that we can learn from that reading.

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